A Yard In Progress, One Year Later

May weather is crazy, ranging from dry summer to cold, grey winter. On the sunny days I spend as much time as possible outside in our garden. On the winter days, however, I spend a lot of time admiring the work that we put into our yard over the last year from the safety of our breakfast room window. We've transformed the space with lots of (stinky) compost, plants, sweat, and blood (but not too much). One of my big goals this year was to remove all grass from our front yard -- it's a pain in the ass to mow, and our yard varies the amount of water and light that it receives that the grass was always scraggly in spots and lush in others. This winter, for my birthday, we put in a much more useable stone path, which is enabling us to really plan out our garden space and take advantage of all it has to offer. Here's our progress from May 2012 to May 2013: 

Top: Front Yard in early June 2012             Bottom: Front Yard in late May 2013

Not all of the plants in the front yard were planted this year, they were added throughout the summer in 2012 and have matured into much larger plants. I spent a lot of time moving things around to accommodate their new size. New plants this year are the little red Salvia, the tiny pink and white English Daisies, small green Heather, and Foxglove to the right. You also can't really see two bushes that we added (because the Crocosmia are so big now), a flaming Dogwood bush with branches that turn bright red in the winter, and a Beauty Berry that will have beautiful purple berries through the fall. 

Top: Side yard in May 2013                   Bottom: Side yard in early May 2013

The side yard is one that took the longest to transform and the most work. Pretty much everything that was there in May 2012 no longer exists, except for the strawberries and the rose bush. The area was a haphazard mix of plants that were too big for the space (the juniper bushes and ornamental pear trees), and ones that were not suited for the hot sun that this space gets in the summer (the still unknown cabbage-y plant to the left). It took little effort to dislodge the trees, as they were poorly planted, and we eased our guilt by replacing them with a much more desirable dogwood tree, two sage bushes, 30+ additional strawberries, raspberries, irises, and daffodils.

Top: May 2012 Helebores and Black Mondo Grass  Bottom: Rhododendron and Fuchsia

I've spent the last year working on the garden space on either side of our front steps. It's a very shady space, so it's taken me a while to figure out the direction I want to go. The side nearest the fence was spent as a Rhododendron triage space, as we had a half-dozen very sickly plants that were put in all of the wrong spots around the house for staging. We've managed to give away five (and still have ten or twelve sprinkled around the yard). For this space, we picked one that has a nice sculptural form and all it wants for now is a nice big rock. It will take some time to pick out just the right one, but for now I'm looking into some lower-growing plants to fill the space -- the fuchsia is just a start. 

And finally, my latest project in the full elimination of all grass from the front of our house is the right-of-way space along the sidewalk. I spent a weekend digging up grass that was constantly shaggy and ugly to find that it was masking a crumbling curb. Oh well, working on finding stones to rebuild the gaps and make my new bed look a little more polished. In the middle is a Manzanita shrub, which is drought and heat tolerant, an evergreen, and has really beautiful sculptural branches when it matures. Around it are annuals that are also heat and drought lovers, which will be replaced eventually with perennials as soon as the Manzanita is large enough to not be completely hidden by larger flowering plants.